Did It Hurt You? (revised)

[tectak]

Just a note on the structure of this poem for Tom, because I have commented on the poem to the poet somewhere else already.

in nuce:

Lament or mourning perhaps fits it better than psalm, I think, Tom. Psalms I find, lack these constrasting, even contradictory emotions. (Of course the Od Testament psalms can start with a lamentation over the facts and then call for a supernatural invisible but still not disprovable power like spaghetti monsters and teacups in space, but they would not be ambilvalent about the same person they address.
(A lament can contain ranting, or angry lines,( I will later show what I mean showing some lines of atras da porta*)
and then switching back to crying over the loss.
A lament** would describe or cover the phases of coping with the loss of ... anything dear, and then end. Not so here:

Now a tragic loss in early childhood will have an impact on the further life of the person (been there ,-) not la negative one. but the point that you must grown up to consciously start to cope with it. if anything works out fine (think david copperfield etc) bc the child has been able to (subconsciously deal with that trauma (congrats then) and/or lucky or helpful circumstances: al fine. If not: one will not be spared to deal with what did not go so well, at a later point in life. First step: reflect on what happened in order to find out where to start the healing. The poetic I in this poem can well represent millions of children, whose parents died in the 2 WWs, very common for the first 2 generations of the 20th in Europe.



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*these lines quoted from:
http://letras.mus.br/chico-buarque/45113/
I quote from this song because first I love it but more importantly the lyrics show in just a handful of lines the different phases of grief over lost ones. (that's why: in nuce. ,-) )
Had there been a good English translation I would used that. (as if you believed it for a second. ,-) )

[...] atrás da porta
reclamei baixinho.
Dei pra maldizer o nosso lar,
pra sujar teu nome, te humilhar

bc you French (fixed it a bit) let me quote that:

"derrière la porte
je me suis plaint doucement
Compte tenu de maudire notre maison.
pour salir ton nom, te humilier ...

So this the plot: (not a translation, but what I know it means (been there)

She bemourns the death of her lover.

1) when they last looked deep into each other eyes,
she (now, in hindsight, thought she had
already known , he would die soon.
2) She finds him dead. Despite the premonition
she cannot believe it , she tosses him around, (she must make sure he is really dead by touching him, she shakes him to wake him up etc, finally strokes his hair as to give him a last touch of love.

3) she sits behind the door of the room where she found him and cries lowly, bemourning ( you know referring to the sergism, lol, ty for that by the way. Ok but back to serious

and now the ranting starts: to talk badly about our home (love implied maybe).
to defame your name, to humiliate you ….

**I mean lament as in bemoaning beloved ones, like here:
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/30

There are other kinds of laments of course like the Li Sao from the Chuci
(big fan of David Hawkes, but this rendering is pretty fine, too. A real serendipity for me.
The plot /narrative could have been written by Gurkski combining 2 totally different strains (shamanism and politics. Not bad. ,-)
No. It is a (collection of) fine and obscure texts and for people interested in ancient southern „China“ and Southeast Asia a very important source, if difficult to put into context.

http://www.chinapage.org/poem/quyuan/quyuan-e.html





serge

Hi Serge,
From a piece entitled Blues, by PeteAk on this site.

Like psalms that tell of hardship and pain,
forbearance and strength from bearing chains,
Blues makes one weep for this unholy world
way before the twelfth bar.

....and he should know because he says he does!
"bar", for your elucidation is, in this context, a musical terminology.
Best,
tectak